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Imagine buying a car. You walk into the showroom but all the cars are behind curtains and you can’t see them. You have to plunk down $35,000 on a car, but you don’t know if you’ve just bought a new BMW or a ‘76 Ford pickup. It’s a total mystery! This is about how I feel about the Red Sox lineup.
Here, what do you think of this:
Enrique Hernandez, 2B
Alex Verdugo, CF
JD Martinez, DH
Xander Bogaerts, SS
Rafael Defers, 3B
Bobby Dalbec, 1B
Christian Vazquez, C
Franchy Cordero, LF
Hunter Renfroe, RF
Some good players, some interesting players, but either way there are a wide range of outcomes for the group! As I’ve written, some of the projections seem to like this lineup, some less so. And you can see why. There’s a lot of variance here. Can Cordero stay on the field for more than 30 games? If so, what do you get out of him? Was last season the end for JD Martinez or was it a blip in a David Ortiz-like career? Can Dalbec hit major league pitching for more than 23 games? Hunter Renfroe is starting? For serious?
But take my favorite of the group, Rafael Devers. Last season Devers hit .263/.310/.483. That’s fine, nine percent above league average in fact, but it’s nowhere near the star turn Devers took in 2019. That’s when Devers hit .311/.361/.555, a line 33 percent above league average, good enough to make him one of the best hitting third baseman in the game. But look at Devers projections for 2021. Baseball Prospectus basically thinks he’ll repeat his 2020 season. FanGraphs thinks he’ll split the difference between 2019 and 2020. Bleah.
I get why they say that. First of all, these aren’t Red Sox fans. They’re not even people. They are computer programs. But those aren’t good projections for Devers. I don’t mean they’re wrong, I mean if they happen, it’s bad for Devers, and bad for the Red Sox. It would be a shame if Devers put up such a fantastic season in 2019 as a 22-year-old then fell off into league averageness. It would be a failure of the player and of the organization, and a(nother) big loss to the fanbase.
So will that happen? I don’t think so.
There are three main reasons.
2020 was BS
Don’t tell the Dodgers this, but the 2020 MLB season was complete and utter BS. Yes it was baseball and yes the Dodgers were the best team and probably would’ve won the World Series even if the regular season had been a normal length, but the small sample size of it combined with the start and stop nature of it wrecked havoc on everything. Some players rolled with it, but some very prominent players did not. Have you seen what Kris Bryant did in 2020? How about Christian Yelich? How about everyone else on my fantasy team? Okay, I kid, I kid, but more than a few absolute star players had horrendous seasons in 2020 and it had everything to do with the season itself and the way things were conducted. This absolutely played a role in Devers’ season as well.
After 2020 spring training was halted, many of the players were stuck in places where they didn’t have access to workout equipment, healthy food, or could practice their baseball routines. As a result, when the season started up again (without much notice), many reported to summer camp out of shape and not having swung a bat or thrown a ball in an abnormal and extreme amount of time. Combine that with the quick start of the season following an abbreviated summer camp and it wasn’t hard to see how some players had rough starts. It’s also not hard to see how those rough starts could snowball into rough seasons. For some who ramped up too quickly, the jump into games lead to injuries that they had to play through given the short nature of the season. All of that applies to Devers.
Alex Cora is Back
I haven’t written about him much (yet) here at Sox Outsider, but having Alex Cora back in the manager’s office is nothing but good news for those hoping for a bounce back from Devers. Much ink has been spilled on the topic of Devers closeness with Cora and while it’s hard to put that kind of thing into numbers, there is undoubtedly an effect. I don’t know how to quantify that effect, how it will manifest itself at the plate and in the field, but it’s hard to imagine it would be anything but a positive influence, which is why I’m bringing it up.
2020 Splits
So recall the part about how the 2020 season was BS. Devers struggled badly when the season began. In the first eight games, all in July, he hit .172. He walked once and struck out about a third of the time. Did that continue into August, you ask? Funny you bring that up because NO IT DIDN’T! From August 1 on, Devers hit .276/.323/.507. Now that’s not that different from what FanGraphs is projecting for 2021, so perhaps I’m accidentally proving their point. And perhaps I am, but consider this: there was no switch that Devers flipped on August 1st. These things are gradual. Yes, he might have been feeling better, been getting his eye back at the plate, fixing his timing, getting into something more approaching game shape by then, but I submit the weirdness of 2020 never went away. That’s not how life works.
But having said that, FanGraphs breaks Devers 2020 into two halves and if you look at the second half, he hit .298/.341/.556. That’s roughly what he did in 2019, minus some on-base. Yes, I’m parsing small sample sizes into smaller sample sizes, and maybe I shouldn’t be applying a narrative to progressively tinier Russian doll-like samples, but it just seems so plain, so easy to see and explain.
Maybe I’m wrong and FanGraphs and BP will be right, but I’m expecting big things out of Rafael Defers in 2021. He arrived at camp in good shape, he’s got his father-figure manager back, and he’s had a full off-season to train and will have a regular spring training to get things going. And even without all that stuff, he did manage to put things together in 2020, though by then it was too late to save his final slash line.
Devers isn’t necessarily the key to whether or not the Red Sox have a successful 2021 season. They can be just fine if he’s his 2020 self again, if BP is right and he’s a slightly above average bat with a bad glove. But if Devers is a borderline MVP again, this lineup takes on a heftier bent, and the 2021 Red Sox will be more competitive, have a better shot at a playoff spot, and will generate more and better smily GIFs of Devers in the dugout, in addition to all the delightfully weird faces he makes while hitting. Now we’ve finally got to what’s important here, right people?
I don’t know about you but I can’t wait to see what the young guy can do this year. And when it comes to those projections, any of them, I’ll take the over.